Quotes About Empathy

The point of books was to combat loneliness

I'm not sure we're any better, but able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

The way to finish the book is to turn down the volume on the stuff that's all about how other people react.

It's just much easier with dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time.

Our feelings of sympathy do not embrace all of humanity in equal measure. Some human beings matter to us. We care intensely about their well-being. Others do not matter very much, and still others do not matter at all. This is a hard saying, and may be difficult to accept but it is obviously and undeniably true.

Subhumans, it was believed, are beings that lack that special something that makes us human. Because of this deficit, they don't command the respect that we, the truly human beings, are obliged to grant one another. They can be enslaved, tortured, or even exterminated—treated in ways in which we could not bring ourselves to treat those whom we regard as members of our own kind. This phenomenon is called dehumanization.

the closer we judge a creature is to us on the hierarchy, the more inclined we are to grant it moral standing.

To understand war, we must understand ourselves.

Actors are so filled with wonder and imagination and they get it so quick, no matter how strange something is. They get it, and their talent is to make it real from a deep place. When that happens it's really, really beautiful.

You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven't gotten across what the experience was like. It's like telling somebody a dream. It doesn't give them the dream. So

Cain wonders what his father had made of him at this age. The idea is startling, that he and his father might have such things in common as pleasures and annoyances of parenthood. Seldom has he let himself consider the world through his father's eyes.

the Great Actor, capable of bringing herself to tears, may extort our admiration for her "accomplishment," but she will never leave us stronger; she has made us pay a price, and made us pretend we like it, but we leave the theatre moved only by our capacity to be moved.

One of the things people generally admire about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it.

Cuál es la utilidad de ser bueno con un pobre? Preguntó Cicerón.

All the elephants of the jungle were gray except Elmer, who was a patchwork of brilliant colors until the day he got tired of being different and making the other elephants laugh.

Schulz] came to see that the better part of his shyness was really vanity, or self-centeredness. Shyness is an illusion, he would say, late in life. If you get out and do something and talk to people, you don't have to be shy. Shyness is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.

That which we want, desire, and insist upon from another person is felt by them as pressure. They will, therefore, unconsciously resist.

I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving.

Is there some lesson on how to be friends? I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact, regardless of whether to kiss or to wound, we still must come together.

If you can't regulate your own emotional temperature, you'll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable.

as partners become better able to self-confront and self-soothe, they have less need to control each other. They can maintain their own emotional stability and worry less about what their partner is doing. They stop expecting their partner to understand them and focus more on understanding themselves, which, in turn, reduces defensiveness and combativeness, and encourages good will and growth rather than resistance and stagnation.

I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.